This bilingual blog - 'आन्याची फाटकी पासोडी' in Marathi- is largely a celebration of visual and/or comic ...तुकाराम: "ढेकणासी बाज गड,उतरचढ केवढी" (Tukaram: For a bedbug a bed is like a castle. so much climbing up and down!)... George Santayana: " Everything in nature is lyrical in its ideal essence, tragic in its fate, and comic in its existence"...William Hazlitt: "Pictures are scattered like stray gifts through the world; and while they remain, earth has yet a little gilding."

G C Lichtenberg: “It is as if our languages were confounded: when we want a thought, they bring us a word; when we ask for a word, they give us a dash; and when we expect a dash, there comes a piece of bawdy.”

H. P. Lovecraft: "What a man does for pay is of little significance. What he is, as a sensitive instrument responsive to the world's beauty, is everything!"

Martin Amis: “Gogol is funny, Tolstoy in his merciless clarity is funny, and Dostoyevsky, funnily enough, is very funny indeed; moreover, the final generation of Russian literature, before it was destroyed by Lenin and Stalin, remained emphatically comic — Bunin, Bely, Bulgakov, Zamyatin. The novel is comic because life is comic (until the inevitable tragedy of the fifth act);...”

John Gray: "Unlike Schopenhauer, who lamented the human lot, Leopardi believed that the best response to life is laughter. What fascinated Schopenhauer, along with many later writers, was Leopardi’s insistence that illusion is necessary to human happiness."

Justin E.H. Smith: “One should of course take seriously serious efforts to improve society. But when these efforts fail, in whole or in part, it is only humor that offers redemption. So far, human expectations have always been strained, and have always come, give or take a bit, to nothing. In this respect reality itself has the form of a joke, and humor the force of truth.”

Friday, December 28, 2012

"In the early 1900s, when Britain ruled India, the chairman
of the colony's Railway Board, Sir Frederick Upcott, was so sceptical about
Tata, then a young steel company, that he declared he would “eat every pound of
steel rail” that it could produce to Britain's exacting specifications. His
subsequent indigestion is not recorded, even though Tata was producing hundreds
of tonnes a year by 1916."

"A Case for Opium Dens: Indian industry got its first tranche of capital accumulation in the 19th century when the Tatas joined hands with the Sassoons and the British to force opium onto the Chinese.
The addicts in China in that period took to opium to drown their
unpleasant reality in momentary dreams, while knowing in moments of cold
assessment that pipe dreams could never be realised in real life. It
was only when Mao Zedong came to
power in 1949 that the Chinese government banned opium dens, and people
accepted their closure in the expectation that they might have a chance
of achieving some of their hopes..."

Arundhati Roy:

"...The Tatas, for example, run
more than 100 companies in 80 countries. They are one of India’s oldest and
largest private sector power companies. They own mines, gas fields, steel
plants, telephone, cable TV and broadband networks, and run whole townships.
They manufacture cars and trucks, own the Taj Hotel chain, Jaguar, Land Rover,
Daewoo, Tetley Tea, a publishing company, a chain of bookstores, a major brand
of iodised salt and the cosmetics giant Lakme. Their advertising tagline could
easily be: You Can’t Live Without Us.

According to the rules of the
Gush-Up Gospel, the more you have, the more you can have..."

"...In the
science fiction film, “The Matrix”, Morpheus tells Neo, “You're here because
you know there's something wrong with the world.” The Matrix, he says, is the
world that has been pulled over everyone's eyes to blind them from the truth
that they are slaves. He offers Neo the choice of a blue or red pill. “You take
the blue pill and the story ends. You wake in your bed and believe whatever you
want to believe. You take the red pill ... and I show you how deep the
rabbit-hole goes.”

The Nira
Radia audio archive loaded on to the Internet by Openand Outlookmagazines
last week is the red pill of our time. It reveals the source codes, networks,
routers, viruses and malware that make up the matrix of the Indian State. The
transmission of information, also known as “news”, between different nodes is
vital for the system to work efficiently. The news is also the medium for
reconciling conflicts between different sectors of the establishment. If you
hear the recordings, you begin to understand the truth about the Wonderland
that is India. No wonder there are many amongst us who would rather swallow the
blue pill. For once you go in, the only way out is to keep digging. And yes,
the rabbit-hole runs deep...

...We also
hear in the tapes an iconic businessman, Ratan Tata, who today makes
sanctimonious statements about crony capitalism and the danger of India
becoming a banana republic, lobbying through his PR agent, Ms Radia, for A.
Raja to be given the Telecom portfolio..."

Artist: William Steig, The New Yorker, 2 July 1960

"I didn't get where I am by begging for raises, Aniruddha, I lobbied for what I wanted."

Look at the cartoon, as old as me, above.
There is not much to it except two things- catchy caption and, more
importantly, the depiction of the boss. I can just go on looking at him
for all day long. That is the hallmark of a great cartoonist like the late Mr. Steig (1907-2003)- she creates the lasting impact out of thin air by her art.

Pages

Will Self: “To attempt to write seriously is always, I feel, to fail – the disjunction between my beautifully sonorous, accurate and painfully affecting mental content, and the leaden, halting sentences on the page always seems a dreadful falling short. It is this failure – a ceaseless threnody keening through the writing mind – that dominates my working life, just as an overweening sense of not having loved with enough depth or recklessness or tenderness dominates my personal one.” John Berger: “Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak. But there is also another sense in which seeing comes before words. It is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world; we explain that world with words, but words can never undo the fact that we are surrounded by it. The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled.” Ezra Pound: "Make it new"...Mark Twain: "Oh, dear me, how unspeakably funny and owlishly idiotic and grotesque was that “plagiarism” farce! As if there was much of anything in any human utterance except plagiarism!... For substantially all ideas are second-hand, consciously and unconsciously drawn from a million outside sources.”… John Crowley: "Meanwhile the real world then, no matter what, will be as racked with pain and insufficiency as any human world at any time. It just won’t be racked by the same old pains and insufficiencies; it will be strange. It is forever unknowably strange, its strangeness not the strangeness of fiction or of any art or any guess but absolute. That’s its nature."...Alexander Waugh: "Beware of seriousness: it is a form of stupidity"...Charles Simic: "There is a wonderful moment when we realize that the picture we’ve been looking at for a long time has become a part of us as much as some childhood memory or some dream we once had. The attentive eye makes the world interesting. A good photograph, like a good poem, is a self-contained little universe inexhaustible to scrutiny." ... Hilary Mantel: “It’s for Shakespeare to penetrate the heart of a prince, and for me to study his cuff buttons.”… Ingmar Bergman: "It is my opinion that art lost its basic creative drive the moment it was separated from worship. It severed an umbilical cord and now lives its own sterile life"... Graham Greene: "Kim Philby betrayed his country-yes, perhaps he did, but who among us has not committed treason to something or someone more important than a country?"... Friedrich Schlegel: "Hercules…labored too…But the goal of his career was really always a sublime leisure, and for that reason he became one of the Olympians. Not so this Prometheus, the inventor of education and enlightenment…Because he seduced mankind into working, [he] now has to work himself, whether he wants to or not"... Walt Whitman: “Do I repeat myself? Very well then, I repeat myself.”...W H Auden: "…though one cannot always/ Remember exactly why one has been happy,/ There is no forgetting that one was"...Walter de la Mare: "No, No, Why further should we roam / Since every road man Journeys by, / Ends on a hillside far from Home / Under an alien sky"...Franz Kafka: “You can hold back from the suffering of the world. You have free permission to do so, and it is in accordance with your nature. But perhaps this very holding back is the one suffering you could have avoided.”..."Over these unremembered marble columns, / birds glide their old remembered way. / Dive in red gold setting tide and write dark alphabets on evening sky /whether an epitaph, chorus or strange augury / little man you only hope to know!"